Collaboration & Productivity

Mealie

Self-host your recipe manager — import from any URL, plan meals and generate shopping lists.

Official documentation

About Mealie

Mealie is a recipe manager and meal planner designed to run on your own server. Import recipes automatically from any URL — Mealie parses the page and extracts ingredients, steps and metadata. Store your own family recipes through the web editor. Build weekly meal plans and generate consolidated shopping lists from your planned meals. Share your instance with your household: each member gets their own account, and you control who can edit or just view. The codebase (AGPL-3.0, 13 k+ stars) uses FastAPI for the backend and Vue.js for the frontend, deployed as a single container with SQLite. No cloud subscription, no tracking, no ads.

What gets installed

Ready when the VPS starts

Compatible OS
Ubuntu 22.04
Application
Mealie
Tech stack
DockerPythonFastAPIVue.js
Minimum RAM
512 MB
Minimum CPU
1 vCPU
Default port
9000
Access
root over SSH

Key features

  • Import recipes automatically from any URL: ingredients, steps and images extracted in seconds.
  • Meal planner to schedule your weekly dinners and lunches, with a calendar view.
  • Automatic shopping list generated from planned meals, with ingredient consolidation.
  • Multi-user support with household accounts, roles (admin, user, viewer) and sharing.
  • Recipe editor for your own family recipes, with photos and custom fields.
  • REST API to automate or integrate Mealie with your other self-hosted tools.

When to use this solution?

Centralize all your recipes

Stop bookmarking cooking blogs. Paste a URL and Mealie extracts the full recipe — ingredients, steps, photos — into your private library.

Plan your meals for the week

Drag your saved recipes onto the weekly planner. Mealie generates the shopping list automatically, consolidating ingredients across all planned meals.

Share with your household

Invite family members with their own accounts. Each person can add recipes, comment or mark meals as favourites, while you keep control of who can edit the library.

Guide

Deploy Mealie on your VPS

  1. Log in with the default credentials

    After installation, open the URL provided in your space and log in with the default account: [email protected] / MyPassword. Change both immediately after your first login in Administration.

  2. Import your first recipe

    On the dashboard, click New Recipe → Import from URL, paste any recipe page URL and Mealie will extract the title, ingredients, steps and main photo in a few seconds.

  3. Plan the week

    Open the Meal Planner section, click a day slot and assign a recipe. Repeat for the week, then click Generate Shopping List — Mealie consolidates all ingredients into a single sorted list.

  4. Invite your household

    Go to Administration → Users and create accounts for your family members. Assign the user role to allow recipe browsing and additions, or viewer for read-only access.

Frequently asked questions

Questions about Mealie

← Back to Collaboration & ProductivityAll applications
The default login is [email protected] with password MyPassword. Change both immediately after your first login in Administration → Your Profile.

Embed the deploy button

Maintaining a project that uses Mealie? This button lets your readers deploy it on a VPS in one click, without reading Docker documentation.

Deploy Mealie on ServOrbit
Markdown
[![Deploy Mealie on ServOrbit](https://servorbit.com/brand/deploy/button.svg)](https://servorbit.com/vps-cloud?template=mealie&utm_source=deploy-badge&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mealie)
HTML
<a href="https://servorbit.com/vps-cloud?template=mealie&utm_source=deploy-badge&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mealie"><img src="https://servorbit.com/brand/deploy/button.svg" alt="Deploy Mealie on ServOrbit" height="40"></a>

The button points to a VPS order with the template preselected. The image is served from servorbit.com — nothing to host on your side.

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Need help?

Browse our help center and FAQ, or reach our team — callback, WhatsApp or email.

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